Junior Eurovision 2022 Thoughts & Analysis
- Dec 26, 2022
- 33 min read
Before I go through the detailed results, let's go through each song first and I'll tell you what I thought of them.
Personal Thoughts by Running Order:
Netherlands - La Festa: a very good opener. It's very traditional JESC, but by being drawn first, it invites people to quite literally "get ready for la festa", as Junior Eurovision has just begun and it's starting to look like a party. I struggle to find a better opener than this to be honest. Unfortunately being the first to perform as a televote-friendly song also means the actual televote gets scuppered a little. Not that much, as we later found out. But still no televote win, as was anticipated by some other people.
As for the performance itself: it was solid. AVROTROS did not come to play this year. They were (I think) coming to win, but again, running order, plus I think many just felt that there were better songs. But come on, in such an even distribution, 70 points ain't half bad. The graphics were nice as well, but they probably stayed on the "LA FESTA" a bit too long. It's supposed to be an upbeat song with lots of quick-cut shots *which they actually did do in the Junior Songfestival performance*, but it became a bit static in Yerevan. Fortunately the song remains catchy as ever and still garnered a lot of televote points. Not enough to win the whole thing or even the televote, but hardly a disgrace compared to what they got last year. Luna's got a bright future ahead of her yet.
Poland: she sings well but I think she gets drowned out a bit by the instrumentation. This could just be my headphones - I was watching some other performances and those had louder instrumentation than vocals as well - but Laura didn't really seem to be shining above the instrumentation. The 3D effects are rather silly. The school outfits thing doesn't really tell as much of a story as I think they would've hoped to do, and the planet transition is just cheesy. Not sure what's going on with Poland's obsession with visual effects this year, both in Turin and in Yerevan.
I saw that the performance at Szansa Na Sukces wasn't really up to par, and I already had in my head that this was gonna get an Ala Tracz-type result. And what do you know - I was right. 10th, which is just about what I'd expected for this. And coming this early in the RO with the Polish voting population not really caring about their own entry, what did you expect.
Kazakhstan: OK, he didn't sound great, let's be honest. But SINGLE DIGIT JURY POINTS?! Someone I was talking to suggested that maybe David Charlin had received a lot of 11th places and hence just barely missed out on points. Well, let's see. I checked all the rankings on jesc.tv and here are the other 15 countries' rankings of Kazakhstan: 13, 11, 10, 12, 15, 7, 12, 14, 14, 15, 15, 13, 15, 15, 14. Jeez. So yeah, he really wasn't that close to points. Maybe he screwed up the jury final even more than he did the live show, we'll never know.
Even the staging wasn't spectacular. I think they put their entire budget into LEDs and didn't have much else other than grey hair dye, a white outfit, dry ice, and a seedling. Camera angles were off; lighting was lacklustre; and I think it just could've been done so much better. In any case, the people at Khabar said before setting off for Yerevan that their result this year would have a great impact on whether they debut at adult Eurovision in Liverpool. Well, I guess we're not seeing them in Liverpool. But this result might cause Khabar to rethink their approach to JESC. A lot of JESC countries right now are just doing what works for them and what gets them a lot of votes - France and Poland come to mind. Kazakhstan was in this category as well, but of course this year happened. Maybe for once we'll see Kazakhstan send something faster than 60 bpm. Or not. But yeah, this year's contest didn't really go all that well for Kazakhstan. Poor kid couldn't hold a note.
Malta: for what it's worth, I think Gaia and the delegation did all they could. The song was laid back to begin with, and sandwiched between a dramatic ballad and a catchy earworm, there was little hope that this would do well. Twitter liked it a whole lot, much to my confusion. I like Gaia's energy, she sang well (especially since the song really wasn't vocally demanding), the presentation was alright, the LEDs and outfits were cool, but this just didn't stand out. I didn't watch MJESC, so I don't know what other options there were in the selection, but this seemed solid as it is. Also the two claps in the chorus I think could've been capitalized on a lot more. They sorta did that in the music video, but it just wasn't really there in the live performance. Again, the package as a whole just didn't stand out, for the better or worse, and someone's gotta come last. What can you do.
Italy: RIP whistle note. At least we got the iconic "bullism" meme out of it. (If you don't know where it comes from: "bullying" in Italian is "bullismo", so it appears the designer of the LEDs assumed that "bullism" is a valid English word. At least we now know the designer is an Italian.) She performed alright, the camera angles were a bit lacklustre for an upbeat song, but all in all the performance was still fun. Some of us have seen the jury final whistle note, and geez. That was...something else. But even if she had nailed it, I still don't see the hype around it. I mean, Eden Alene was doing a whistle note and (almost) nailed it. That didn't stop her from getting 19th place in the grand final.
Otherwise I don't have a whole lot to say about this. I do wonder why Rai decided to now broadcast JESC on Rai Uno. At least we know that the UK was bringing a potential winner and so wanted maximum exposure for self-voting, but did Rai believe in earnest that Chanel Dilecta was going to fight for the win? Well...good on them for their confidence I suppose.
France: ooh boy. So many things I would want to say about this, but it's a kids' contest so I'll try to keep it polite. I will say this much: great performer. Bucket-loads of charisma. When Lissandro says his idol is Elvis Presley, it's not hard to see why.
But with as much respect as I can muster, I think I can count the number of notes he sang ON-KEY on two hands. He nailed the last few notes, and that's kinda it. Maybe he did great in the jury final, we wouldn't know. But he certainly wasn't that good in the pre-show snippet. I don't know, is it just me? It seems that a lot of the dislike for this entry comes from the dislike of the song, but some of them were convinced by the performance. I'm kinda the opposite, where I actually like the song - great chord progressions - but the performance just ruined it for me. ESPECIALLY the fact that he wasn't able to hit many notes on/in-key, if any. If you scroll back through my live tweeting of JESC2022, you'll find that I actually ranked France last after the performances. And that's not me being contrarian; I genuinely just could not bear watching the performance because it was so terribly off-key. After the winner announcement happened, you'll see on the stream that I turned off the sound before the winner reprisal. Maybe this is what happens when you're musically trained and possibly have perfect pitch. Who knows.
But still, full respect to the winner. They didn't hijack the voting system or anything - even most French were surprised at their victory. But I suppose a combination of being jury friendly and sufficiently entertaining for the public to vote for means victory. Who knew. I might even argue that an overly spread televote means greater jury influence, but perhaps that's a topic for another day. I just think that it's funny that everyone was saying either Georgia or Armenia would win, and then France comes out of nowhere to take the W.
Albania: giving everything in the vocals, but the song is giving nothing. And we return to the point of jury influence - you could argue that had the televote been less even, Albania would not have had a hope of escaping the bottom 3. But what do I know. Anyways, Kejtlin Gjata - a great voice wasted on the flattest song I've seen sent to JESC in the past two years. Maybe RTSH put all their funding into FIK 61.
Georgia: the execution I think was decent, although not on the money. Mariam sings very well, but the staging was just missing something I think to make it truly worthy of a winner. Mostly the camera angles and lighting. It wasn't appropriately reflecting the intensity in the song nor the message of the song. The outfits are apparently inspired by traditional Georgian dress, but I think it's safe to say that most people in Europe don't know much about traditional Georgian dress. So I can see why it could be a little off-putting, and frankly I'm not super surprised that it didn't do as well in the televote. Nonetheless, I'm glad that the jury valued it as much as they did, and this top 3 placement cements the place of Georgia as a Junior Eurovision powerhouse.
Ireland: oh man. Where do I even begin? This was just an absolute delight, start to finish. Far and out my favourite performance of the night. She's a joy to talk to (not that I'd know), she held strong even with a sore throat and a chest infection, and came through to get Ireland's best result at any Eurovision event since *1997*. She wasn't even born back then!
But it just goes to show the power of a good vocalist and a good song. People always talk about how Ireland doesn't send any songs in the Irish language to Eurovision; well, Michael Kealy, the Irish head of delegation, made a very good point on an interview on the Éirevision podcast: it's not just about the language, but also the quality of song. A song shouldn't be presented to Eurovision (or the national final) just because it's in Irish. If it's good AND in Irish, then so be it. But we shouldn't compromise song quality for the native language. I mean, while there were quite a few native language entries that did very well in Turin, a number of them also crashed and burned in the semis, for example Slovenia. (disclaimer: I'm not saying Disko is bad; I'm saying that it wasn't considered good enough by either the jury or public to vote it into the final.) (And FYI, if you're wondering whether there will be an Irish-language song in Eurosong 2023: almost certainly not. Kealy said he received ONE song in Irish out of 320+ submissions, and there's a pretty good chance that it's not among the best 6 in the pack.)
Solas didn't just score well because it was in Irish; it scored well because it was a GOOD SONG. The composition, the instrumentals, the chord progressions. The Irish language certainly didn't hurt, but I'm sure an English adaptation would have made as much noise. I mean, I'm fairly certain Sophie Lennon doesn't even speak Irish. She's from the North after all, where you won't find many Irish speakers outside of maybe Belfast. And she's not from Belfast.
But speaking of Sophie Lennon, she's the second reason Ireland placed in the top 5: a good vocalist. She sings with passion and emotion, and you can tell in her facial expressions. She sings with strength, but knows when and how to rein it in. She makes the song come alive, even though she was just standing in the middle of the stage atop a pedestal. The dry ice in the build-up part certainly helped to build the mood as well. She missed the vocal run right before the key change, but she got herself back together so quickly, you'll be forgiven for thinking that nothing ever went wrong at all.
I'll be honest, the staging itself leaves something to be desired. The aforementioned dry ice is nice, but the lighthouse while memorable might be a little bit tacky. And long shots are fine - this is a ballad after all - but perhaps there could be a few more close-ups. And to think that initially there were plans for her to wear a cape with some wings underneath! What the hell was that?
But even then, it doesn't matter. A great song and a great vocalist doesn't need a whole lot to shine; refer to Barbara Pravi and Voila. And that's exactly what happened here: an excellent track, performed and sung very well, and it was rightly rewarded with a good position. It's really as simple as that. Not sure why some delegations (cough cough Albania 2021) think it's necessary to go all out, perhaps even over the top, with staging, but then not have it or the song be memorable enough to get people actually voting for it.
Now, I will concede, a good amount of Ireland's 62 televote points probably came from UK voters finding some other country to vote for while voting for Freya. But how much, we won't possibly know for certain, and really that's just kinda the nature of the game. What can you do about it. "Eurovision is so politicized", moans the Brits who simultaneously politicize their own voting in JESC. Regardless, the point stands - if a song is good, it'll get votes. Same principle applies to the new jury-free semifinals for adult Eurovision 2023. Ireland got 62 points in the JESC televote. That's 8th in the televote and higher than "winner alert" Georgia. Were this a semifinal, Ireland would've still qualified.
If you're wondering why I don't talk about the message of the song: don't get me wrong, it's very good. To spread awareness that for every person, there is a "light" (hence, solas) willing to be there for them. But if even most people in Ireland don't speak Irish on a daily basis, what's the point in hoping that other people in Europe would get the message? I'm not even sure if the juries were voting based on lyrical content.
Nonetheless, a brilliant performance from Sophie Lennon, excellent work from TG4, and let's see if RTÉ and Irish musicians more generally can learn a few lessons from Solas. Like Luna, Sophie's got a bright future ahead of her yet. She says she likes singing Celine Dion's songs. Perhaps, when one falls, another one rises... Best wishes to Celine though, for sure. Hope she's well.
North Macedonia: this was quite nice actually, although I actually missed the much hyped #LoveMyGirlfriend scene. Could someone point it out to me? I missed it. A nice song, well sung, but sadly sandwiched between Ireland and Spain this wasn't gonna be all that memorable. Disappointed for their result, but somebody's gotta come bottom 2. The rap part was surprisingly not as standout as I'd expected, although I still find it funny that for most of the performance Jovan is effectively relegated to the role of dancer. Also respect to Irina, who was one of the main members upon prior announcement but also got relegated to the last name in the ft. section. Ah well. Life happens. Although I do find it funny that MRT are doing JESC next year but not adult ESC. We'll see what they bring I suppose.
Spain: still quite disappointed that the "bai-la-la-la-la-la-la" and "ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya" were only sung in the last chorus. I guess we could call it "pulling a Slo Mo". Perhaps even more disappointed that the song had no Armenian lyrics in it, since Carlos Higes sang in Armenian on La Voz Kids while singing "Colours Of Your Dream" by Karina from Armenia JESC2019. The choreo was certainly good, but I think the camera angles were a bit off. Could've done a little better highlighting the dance moves and the little quirks and changes in the song. Neon is an OK choice, and it certainly stands out, but I'm not certain it was the *best* choice.
And call me cynical all you want, but I think the vast majority of televote points they got were from self-voting. I think it'd be really interesting to do JESC public voting like adult Eurovision for once - no pre-voting, no self-voting. Of course it'd be harder to regulate being a free vote and all that, but some are speculating whether the registration-based system required for UK voters might be rolled out to all voters in the near future. We wait and see. Back to Spain though - clearly RTVE wants to win a Eurovision event, and I respect them for that. Not with Señorita though.
United Kingdom: For all the misfortunes that Freya Skye had to go through on the week of the contest, I think this is a result which the British can be proud of. And the last-minute salvages were also genius, like the "let's go Junior Eurovision" at the original high note at the last chorus, and having the backing dancers sing some of the more vocally demanding parts. Nonetheless, I'm glad that Freya still tried her best despite her ailments, and won the televote in the end for a respectable top 5 finish. Like with Spain, I wouldn't be surprised either if a lot of the points also came from Brits self-voting. But I still think it's a genuinely high-quality production that deserves a lot of points.
The lighting and camera angles were spot on. Dan Shipton working his magic once again. I do think that had Freya been vocally well, we would've at the very least seen UK above Georgia, or maybe even Armenia. But I suppose there's no point speculating on what could've been. Though I must say even with the toned-down performance, I expected the UK to end above Ireland. Potato jokes aside, again I think this shows the dominance of the jury vote given the very evenly spread televote, since of course Solas got a higher jury mark than Lose Your Head. Regardless, Freya's an EXCELLENT performer, and she's already released another single prior to JESC. Truly a pop star in the making. I think both her and Sophie Lennon said that they would eventually want to do adult Eurovision, so that's lovely. We wait and see.
Portugal: I'll be honest, this was not (and arguably still is not) in my personal top 3 of the night. But when it came time to vote I just had to vote for him. He's such a performer, so much personality, and so much of an f-you to those who thought that this was gonna be dead in the water. And that raspy voice! He's gonna be a rock star.
Did he benefit from tactical voting? It's possible. But would it not be more obvious to vote for, say, Albania if one were to tactically vote? Regardless of the reason, I think it's amazing that Portugal has for two years in a row punched above their weight in the televote.
I also think it's great that RTP are starting to *get* Junior Eurovision. O Rapaz was nice, but the staging wasn't perhaps as impactful as they'd been hoping for; this year they really put some budget into the lighting and LEDs. It builds a great atmosphere that wonderfully suits the song. Regardless, a great top 10 result for Portugal which I hope they can continue to build upon with unique and authentic entries.
Serbia: genuinely wondering, what happened to Katarina Savić that rendered her unable to even attend the flag parade and common song? At least Freya Skye was able to do that.
Anyways, the performance was good, although I think the pre-show snippet had better vocals than the clip that was played for the live show. That aside, the whole thing gave off a very "pretty" vibe, I can't really describe it any other way, but I liked it a whole lot. Became one of my post-show favourites actually, even though I wasn't really feeling the song itself. Serbia's been sending very "cute" songs to JESC these past few years - perhaps that's the image that they're seeking to build for themselves here. 11th place, could've been better, but I suppose going between two hard-hitters was gonna compromise it a little.
Armenia: an absolute slayage, to quote what the kids say these days. But I still find the random shot at the disco ball kinda weird. Speaking of disco balls, why were the dancers wearing them?? Whose idea was that?? It doesn't serve any purpose in enhancing the performance, just makes it harder for the dancers to see. The choreography also feels a little bit too childish, compared to what we saw in the music video. Also wish we could've had a little bit more than just walking towards the camera for the "dance break" part. But I suppose it's asking too much of 14 year olds to do a Chanel (not Dilecta) style dance break.
Camera angles though? Spot on. Far and out the best of the night. (Excluding that disco ball shot of course.) Some people postulate that perhaps Armenia got their own separate director for their own performance, and perhaps that could be true. Nonetheless, the show the host entry put on just goes to show that Armenia GETS Junior Eurovision. Another 2nd place for them - certainly not a disgrace. Armenia's turning into the UK of Junior Eurovision in this sense. Nare's also a very promising performer and singer. THAT HIGH NOTE. Can't wait to see what they've got lined up next year, but this was good proof that a host country can't just take a backseat on the quality of their own entry just because they're hosting. And it certainly seems like the UK delegation agrees.
Ukraine: not really much to say about this one. I think I prefer Vazhil, their entry last year, especially in terms of the LEDs and vocals. Olena Usenko had her own grit, her own style that was just tremendous. Zlata Dziunka was nice as well, great vocals, but again I think Olena Usenko was superior. To be fair to them, I suppose they might not have had as much time and funding to prepare. Some people were speculating that this would get a Kalush-level televote, but what they got was a pretty standard Ukraine-at-JESC televote.
Results Analysis, Predictions Review:
I don't think I'll go through every single result, but let's check out the splits.
Yes I made this in Microsoft Word, because I already had it open and the table-creating function on Wix is trash. Plus I made it in Word last year for the PowerPoint as well.
And technically Italy and Poland are tied, but Poland is listed above Italy because one of the tiebreakers is the running order. If a country goes before another one in the running order and scores exactly the same, it gets the higher placement. That, or the number of 12-points received (although Italy got two 12s I think, so I'm not really sure). Same case with Kazakhstan and North Macedonia in the televote. Or online vote, since we're not texting or calling to vote here.
But you see what I mean about the evenly spread public vote? 47 points between first place and last. Meanwhile in the jury, *127* points between first and last. And you can tell their influence on the final ranking as well: the *entire top 7* is exactly the same as the jury top 7. I really hope the EBU can take steps to make the public vote less spread-out, and/or reduce the jury vote's influence one way or another. Maybe force the juries to vote more sparingly so we get a more spread-out jury vote, I don't know.
You'll find as well that France is one of the biggest beneficiaries of this system - France has won the jury vote THREE YEARS IN A ROW now, and almost solely because of that, they've gotten a top 3 result and two victories. Frankly I think that for the results to have as much validity as those in the adult contest, there really should be some measure to equalize the influence of the two types of votes. I think there's some policy where every country starts with some baseline of televote? Maybe don't do that, and then only announce the top 10 in the public vote, so we don't get some kid crying on camera. Keep the rest either just as an eternal secret like the split results of ESC2013 or quietly put it out after the show ends. Because as it stands the jury is free to vote however they wish to vote, which is fine, but because of the baseline and equalizing measures enacted on the public vote, the online vote is, as we already mentioned, much more evenly spread than the jury vote, which makes for OK television but also increases jury influence in a system where the results are supposed to be 50/50 public/jury. I know the EBU won't read this, but it's still an issue that I think they should be at least talking about.
Otherwise, I'll point out some things I find interesting in the splits. A lot of points I already made in the individual review section, so I'm not gonna repeat those for the most part. Portugal becoming an accidental televote powerhouse (possibly due to tactical voting), Kazakhstan getting SLAUGHTERED by the jury, Georgia getting robbed by the public vote, Ukraine not getting a Kalush-level public score and in fact getting a public score that's quite typical for Ukraine at JESC, Italy and Poland somehow being exactly 1:1 tied, and Spaniards hypnotizing themselves into believing that they could've won when they couldn't even get top 5 in the jury vote, all very interesting. Still, I'm so glad that the jury valued Ireland so much. Although on balance I still think that perhaps UK should've placed higher than Ireland, but I guess that's what a playback rehearsal clip does to ya.
I will also say that the high public mark for France surprised me - especially being higher than *Armenia*. Before the show, I kept saying "do not underestimate the Armenian diaspora's voting power", but I guess I overestimated them? I don't know. If even the French were surprised at their win, I suppose some Europeans just REALLY liked Lissandro? Or conversely, it may have ironically been a case of tactical voting, where they think that it's so bad that there's no chance of it winning. Well, it turns out there is a chance of it winning. Very much so. Speaking of tactical voting, Ireland getting a higher public mark than Georgia might just be the power of the British voting public. Given the mark Titanic (the movie) left on contemporary British and Irish pop culture, it stands to reason that Solas, which many have drawn parallels with My Heart Will Go On, would be very much favoured by British audiences just melodically even if/when they don't know a word of Irish.
I'm also surprised the jury in general rated Portugal more highly than Poland or Ukraine, or, hell, Serbia. We all thought Svet Bez Granica was aimed at getting jury points, but it turns out the public gave them more points? Could be a consequence of the equalizing mechanism but who knows. To be fair, it's a rather...different song, and again it came between two hard-hitters. And again, what the hell happened to Kazakhstan? Was it really THAT off-putting? I didn't like it but I thought juries were generally attracted to big notes? What happened there?? Well, let's see if Khabar learns to send something faster than 60 bpm next time.
Now let's compare the actual results to my pre-show predictions. I made three sets of predictions: two on the blog right here, and one on Twitter, as follows:
Let's see...
Correct; I was banking on this so I wouldn't get EVERYTHING wrong.
They didn't win televote, but because of the overarching power of the jury they *did* get top 2. 50%.
Honestly, yeah. I mean, for a pre-contest no-hoper to tie with the Netherlands and Armenia?! For sure.
Top 4: well, I didn't expect the jury to put Freya this low, even with the playback thing. Also didn't expect Netherlands to NOT be top 2 in the televote, but I guess the running order did its magic. Correct with the rest.
5-7: Kazakhstan HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAAHA. Sorry but as the Spanish would say, tienes que reír. Got Spain right, honestly didn't expect such a good response from the jury for Ireland, since everyone was saying that Banshee got robbed.
8-10: Serbia kinda gagged a bit but the rest spot on.
11-14: France, well... I got Italy right and that's about it. Again, where does Portugal get all of its televote points from?! And RIP Malta.
15-16: again, the overarching power of the jury meant Albania didn't need to end bottom 3, although North Macedonia didn't end bottom 3 either so I guess I got this one all wrong. Overall ranking verdict: 6/16. Not great.
Well...you can answer this one yourselves. It's a kids' contest, I'll try to remain civil.
Well, I got this right, but I don't know how I did. Perhaps even TOO right.
4/7. Could've been worse.
8/9. Much better. No clue how I got Portugal. I guess they're just a new televote powerhouse at this point.
Honestly I got this from RAJC, a British Eurovision Youtuber that I watch. He suggested that the Polish would come out in droves to vote for themselves regardless of the quality of the entry, and honestly right after I posted this prediction I was doubting myself on that. And I was right to doubt! At least my initial prediction of Laura getting an Ala Tracz-type result was correct.
Well...close but no cigar.
Read above.
Now let's take a look at my blog posts. If you missed them, here they are:
And here's my predictions, versus the final result, labelled with changes:
So yeah. Not great with most of these. Although I also did televote and jury top 3 predictions:
...
I mean, in my defense, I put IRELAND there when no one else dared to. But yeah, you can see why I'm...not great at predictions. Moving on
Trivia (aka Statistics):
This first part comes courtesy of Twitter user @euro_bruno, who like me is a statistics nerd. He went and counted all the first and last places of every single juror from every single participating country. In descending order, the top 5 countries that got the most *first* places from individual jurors are:
Georgia (17)
France (15)
Armenia (10)
Italy (7)
Ireland (6)
(FYI, the UK got 5, and Spain and Netherlands 3 each.)
And sadly, the top 5 countries that got the most *last* places are:
Kazakhstan (24)
North Macedonia (12)
Serbia (9)
Malta (6)
Albania, Portugal (5)
Reminder that there are 16 countries with 5 jurors each, giving us a total of 80 jurors. And if you need a refresher on the rankings of each national jury for Kazakhstan: 13, 11, 10, 12, 15, 7, 12, 14, 14, 15, 15, 13, 15, 15, 14. For balance(?), I'll do France as well: 2, 2, 2, 1, 1, 3, 13, 1, 2, 6, 1, 2, 5, 6, 2.
This second part comes mostly courtesy of Eurovoix, specifically by Emily @EurovisionEmily, who posted an article titled "Junior Eurovision: The Updated Facts and Figures Following The 2022 Contest". I'll extract the highlights that relate to 2022, and add information I found by myself after asterisks.
Armenia now has five 2nd places, which is the most out of any country in Junior Eurovision. **The next largest number of 2nd places is two, shared by Georgia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Spain and Ukraine.
2022 was the first time Georgia received a 3rd place finish. **While they have won three times and gotten second twice, prior to 2022 their next best result was 4th which were achieved in 2007, 2010 and 2021.
Ireland achieved their best result in JESC to date, 4th place, overtaking their previous best result which was 10th in 2016. **4th is also the highest any Irish act at any Eurovision event has placed since 1997, which saw Marc Roberts get 2nd place in Dublin with "Mysterious Woman".
The Netherlands placed 7th, which becomes the third time they have placed in this position since 2003. **The previous two times were in 2005 and 2012.
Portugal also achieved their best result in JESC to date, 8th place. Their previous best result was in fact just the year before: 11th place.
Albania finished 12th, but this was in fact their second best JESC result to date, with their best result having been 5th place in 2015.
Serbia finishes 13th which was also their position in 2021.
**This is the first time North Macedonia has placed 14th. Since 2003 they have placed 12th a total of *8* times, and 15th once in 2006, but they have still yet to place 13th.
Kazakhstan received their worst ever placement this year, at 15th place. Their previous worst placement was 8th last year, **and were among countries such as France, Armenia, Denmark and Australia who had never placed outside the top 10. This year means that it is of course no longer the case.
Malta placed last, meaning they now have 3 last place finishes to their name. This matches the record of North Macedonia, who also have 3 last place finishes: 2006, 2013 and 2015.
Finally, some general trivia that I found myself.
France winning the contest in 2022 breaks the running order trend that had been going since 2015 - where in even-number years, the winner would be the last to perform, and in odd-number years, the winner would have an odd-number running order slot, which goes down by 2 every two years (Destiny: 15th, Polina Bogusevich: 13th, Viki Gabor: 11th, Malena: 9th). Going by that trend, Ukraine should've won this year as they were last in the RO, but of course France won instead, breaking this trend. We wait and see whether the 7th in RO next year will win.
Lissandro winning from 6th in the running order means that this is the second-in-a-row first half RO winner, while there has not been one of those between 2009 and 2020 inclusive.
France winning JESC for a second time means that France has become the first-ever country to win BOTH the adult and junior contests more than once. None of the other JESC "multi-winners" (Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Malta, Poland, Russia) have won the adult contest multiple times, most of them not even once.
Lissandro is also the first male winner of the contest since 2014, when Vincenzo Cantiello won for Italy. All winners since then, up to and including Malena, have been female.
The first half had an average mark of 108.25 (51.5 public + 56.75 jury) and a rank of 9.375, while the second half had an average mark of 123.875 (64.625 public + 59.25 jury) and a rank of 7.625, making the second half the higher-scored half in both the jury and public marks.
This year is the first time North Macedonia has sent more than two vocalists. (Dajte Muzika in 2021 had 4 members, but the girls did not hold mics in the live performance and may have at best contributed to the backing track.)
Sophie Lennon is the first Irish JESC representative from Northern Ireland. She comes from (and I think still lives in) Mayobridge, in County Down. Earlier in the year Brooke Scullion, who was born in County Derry also in Northern Ireland, represented Ireland at the adult contest in Turin. This also makes it the first year ever where both the junior and adult representatives of Ireland at Eurovision come from Northern Ireland.
The UK finished exactly above Spain in the overall results of adult Eurovision 2022, the jury ranking of Junior Eurovision 2022, the televote ranking of JESC2022 and the overall ranking of JESC2022.
Poland and Italy ended up with the exact same amount of public vote points, jury vote points and thus overall points. That said, Italy received 2 sets of 12 points from the jury, while Poland received none.
In total, 9 countries ranked in the exact same positions where they were ranked by the jury: the top 7, plus Serbia and North Macedonia. Portugal, Ukraine, Poland and Italy were also ranked in the same relative order as in the jury ranking, albeit being one off numerically.
In contrast, only *one* country ranked in the same position as it was ranked in the televote: Malta. You could make the same argument for Kazakhstan and North Macedonia, however strictly speaking they are tied in the public vote while they are not in the final result.
The only point swapping that occurred was 4 points between Italy and Kazakhstan, 2 points between Georgia and Ireland and 1 point between Serbia and Spain. Last year saw several 12-point swaps.
Despite only receiving two sets of 12-points, Georgia placed higher than Armenia, which got 4 sets of 12-points in the jury.
The only two countries that got points from all juries were Georgia and Spain; France was blanked by Malta, while Armenia was blanked by Italy. Ireland was blanked by Kazakhstan and Albania, but otherwise got points from all juries as well. The UK meanwhile was blanked by Serbia and, wait for it, Ireland.
In terms of overall juries rather than jury members, the country most often ranked last by juries is still Kazakhstan (5), followed by Malta (4), and North Macedonia (3).
If we divide the participating countries into these categories: western Europe, Caucasus, southern Europe, eastern Europe, central Asia, and Balkans, then the strongest group in terms of average points per country would be the Caucasus, at 170.5 points, followed by western Europe at 156.75 points. The weakest group would be central Asia at 47 points (obviously), followed by the Balkans at 80 points on average.
The most viewed music video this edition BY FAR is Armenia, with Dance at the time of writing just 7000 views away from 2 *million* views. After that is Spain at 1.53M views, and UK at 1.105M views.
The most viewed live performance however is Spain, at 665K views, followed by France at 607K views and Armenia at 603K views. The UK performance is only at 279K views, which is even lower than Georgia (321K) and Poland (479K). Among the eventual actual top 5 the outlier is Ireland, with only 294K on the music video and 80K on the live performance.
The 5 countries with the largest public-jury discrepancies are Georgia (67 points), France (61), Armenia (40), Kazakhstan (37) and North Macedonia (30). The 5 countries with the smallest discrepancies are Albania (8), Serbia (10), Poland & Italy (11), Netherlands (12), and UK (14).
Netherlands remains the only country to continue attending every single edition of the contest. Prior to 2021, Belarus was also on this list. Beyond Belarus, the countries with the smallest number of absences are North Macedonia, Russia and Ukraine, with 3 absences each, although Russia's number will grow due to suspension from the EBU, while North Macedonia's will not, as they have already confirmed 2023 participation. Georgia and Armenia each sit at 4 and 5 absences respectively.
The countries with the largest number of absences (i.e. smallest number of participations) are Serbia & Montenegro and Switzerland, both of which only competed once. Germany, Montenegro and Wales have each participated twice, although the number for Germany will increase next year. Both Denmark and Norway took part for 3 editions and never came back.
In terms of 2022, the country with the smallest number of prior participations as well as the country with the longest time since previous participation is the UK, with 3 prior appearances (2003-2005) and 17 years since their last participation.
Portugal 2022 becomes the first ever JESC (and possibly ESC?) entry to contain its eventual public vote score in the song title.
Junior Eurovision 2023: What Do We Know?
Well, obviously there's no real point making a What We Know So Far blog post quite literally days after the previous event ended. But we do already have some information:
Host country: most likely France
This was confirmed by a France Televisions official, as well as the French HOD less than an hour after Lissandro had taken the trophy. Although the EBU has yet to make an official statement confirming this on their part.
Host city: likely to be one out of Nice (Palais Nikaïa), Strasbourg (Strasbourg Zénith), Nantes (Zénith Nantes Metropole), Bordeaux (Arkéa Arena), and Toulouse (Zénith Toulouse)
Nice had in fact already been considered for 2021 and the team heavily implied that they did not want to do it in Paris, but due to Covid concerns they had no choice but to keep it in Paris. This is also why I didn't include Paris here; plus they have the 2024 Olympics to deal with. Rumours are saying that Nice is the most likely, but the other four are also very much possible. Note that these are not necessarily judged by arena capacity, as one of the largest arenas in France, the Sud De France Arena with 14800 seats, is not a favourite according to the rumours that I'm seeing. These 5 cities have arenas ranging from 9000-12000 seats.
Confirmed countries so far: Armenia, France (of course), Georgia, Germany, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Poland, Spain, UK
During the 2022 winner's press conference, the Armenian head of delegation and executive producer of the 2022 contest, David Tserunyan, said, and I quote, "we can't wait to come back to France".
It might be weird to see North Macedonia there considering they've withdrawn from Eurovision 2023 in Liverpool. But it's very much on the Macedonian agenda - literally. The Macedonian broadcaster posted their budget for 2023 earlier this year, and they have allocated funding for JESC participation, but not ESC.
Georgia has already opened submissions for Ranina 2023, their annual national selection for JESC.
There's no written confirmation for Germany yet, but their commentator this year, Konsi, has confirmed it on air during the JESC broadcast on KiKa. Interestingly, they may also use the popular KiKa program "Dein Song" as a new selection method for the German entry, where German children and teens try their hand at songwriting.
And yes, this means that as soon as we get confirmation from Rai that Italy will be in JESC2023 (which, given that they've just put JESC2022 on Rai *Uno*, I doubt they'd not do), this will be the *first-ever* edition of Junior Eurovision where the whole Big Five are present. We love to see it.
AVROTROS opened calls for Junior Songfestival 2023 submissions right after JESC2022 ended.
Dziennik Eurowizyjny, the main Polish Eurovision fan site, also wrote that "Poland will certainly be [in JESC2023] too". This has yet to be confirmed by TVP, but given their track record, it would be strange not to expect them to continue participation.
Spain and UK both confirmed participation indirectly; RTVE said that they have a plan of "regularly" participating in Junior Eurovision, while Lee Smithurst, the British JESC HOD, has said on the Euro Trip podcast that this year's participation was "not a one-off", and they also have plans of staying. In fact, according to some rumours, a representative may have already been selected, and it is 13-year-old Astrid Allegrah, who has already released a number of singles.
No withdrawals are otherwise expected from the class of 2022, despite the songwriter for Jer-Ana saying "goodbye to Eurovision" on his Instagram.
Non-participating countries so far: Belarus, Denmark, Norway, Russia
Okay, we get it. The country whose kids' singing show JESC was based upon doesn't like the show anymore. No need to shut things down less than 24 hours after the contest just ended.
Belarus and Russia are self-explanatory. Apparently Russia had planned their own JESC spin-off named Naše Pokolenie ("Our Generation"), in which Syria was apparently rumoured to take part, and it was planned for autumn 2022. But of course that didn't happen, and they've now pushed the date to "spring 2023".
Norway isn't 100% unequivocally confirmed, but earlier in December the Norwegian head of delegation said that NRK will not return to JESC in the "near future", and I would assume near future constitutes more than just one year. Furthermore, both the Danish and Norwegian MGP Juniors require singers to write their own songs, while the general culture in modern JESC has become adults writing songs and then giving them to young singers, with a few exceptions such as Ukraine 2021 and Albania 2022.
Show date: unknown, but may be pushed forward
For multiple reasons, not least Freya Skye, Sophie Lennon and now Katarina Savić becoming ill mere days before the contest, the EBU said in a press conference that they are looking at changing the date of Junior Eurovision. Since it's already in December, and you can't really move it to January, this most likely means moving the show forward. By how much, we don't really know yet. Traditionally JESC was always held in mid to late November; it's only been the past two years where they've actively tried to work Christmas into the show. They might return to late November, or even earlier than that. Great news for students like me who have exams in December.
The show may also be pushed forward in the sense of the day of the week; most recent contests have been held on Sundays, but during the JESC press conference in Yerevan, Martin Österdahl, the EBU executive supervisor, mentioned that there are ongoing discussions within the Steering Group on whether the show should be held instead on a Saturday, which is television prime-time for Western European countries, whereas Sunday tends more to be prime-time for Eastern European countries.
Possible debutants/returnees: Azerbaijan, Croatia?, Estonia, Iceland, Slovakia?, Sweden
Azerbaijan of course didn't do JESC2022 because, well, it's Azerbaijan and Armenia, but judging by the attitudes of the Azerbaijani delegation, it appears that they have a view of returning to the contest for good. So it's very likely we will see them (back) in France next year.
ERR ruled out doing the contest in Yerevan because of financial constraints, but did not rule out a debut in the future, which would make them the final Baltic country to enter Junior Eurovision.
Iceland had been hotly rumoured to debut in the 2022 contest after broadcasting the 2021 contest on a delay and sending a delegation to Paris, however RÚV ultimately said that they would need more time to formulate their plans for the contest, possibly even creating a pre-selection show akin to Söngvakeppnin, their national final for the adult contest. Interestingly though, they neither sent a delegation to Yerevan nor broadcasted the 2022 show at all.
Croatia's broadcaster, HRT, had been extremely silent on JESC while other Balkan broadcasters such as RTVSLO and BNT were publicly ruling it out. There was also a fake account spreading rumours of Croatia returning to the contest; plus of course Croatia was the first winner of Junior Eurovision and it would've been very symbolic if the first winner returned to the show on its 20th anniversary. Of course, they ultimately did not show up on the participant list, but rumours were nonetheless going around.
Slovakia - it's not all that likely at this moment, but RTVS had contemplated joining Junior Eurovision as recently as 2019 and 2021. The energy crisis caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine may have hampered those plans, and given that neither the Czech Republic nor Slovakia were very interested in Eurovision to begin with, it makes sense for them not to debut just yet. But I wouldn't completely rule Slovakia out for the foreseeable future.
Martin Österdahl has also said in a press conference in Yerevan that he is "having a dialogue with some countries in northern Europe" and he hopes that they will eventually take part. Recall that last year in Paris he said that the EBU were working hard to get the UK back to Junior Eurovision and were having discussions with the BBC, and look where we're at. Regardless, whether those "countries in northern Europe" just mean our aforementioned Estonia and/or Iceland or it includes other northern countries like Sweden or Finland is unknown.
And it might feel weird to see Sweden there, given that our aforementioned Norway and Denmark are so against even the idea of Junior Eurovision. But Sweden has not run any sort of nationwide children's singing contest since 2014. And when it had been running, the show named "Lilla Melodifestivalen" was mostly a pre-selection for JESC rather than the short-lived MGP Nordic, which only ran from 2006-2009. And indeed, Sweden was the most enthusiastic Nordic country for JESC, with their most recent entry being in 2014 as opposed to 2005 for Norway and Denmark (and, well, never for Finland). When SVT announced their non-participation this year, they worded their statement very specifically that their non-participation only applied to 2022. And with Martin Österdahl himself being obviously a Swede, it's very much plausible that he will attempt to get his own country onboard with the contest. Furthermore, with MGP Junior, Denmark and Norway try to emphasize the singers' authenticity by having the singers write their own songs, but we can see in regular Melodifestivalen and even in some non-Swedish Eurovision entries that the Swedes are not averse to getting renowned songwriters to write a song and then having a completely unrelated singer sing it. This very much lines up with the model of modern JESC. So we'll see what happens. Finland is more of an unknown, but what's even more unknown is the very existence of Junior Eurovision among Finns.
Possible rule changes: registration?
Good chance you already read about this on the WWKSF blog for JESC2022, but basically British viewers had to register and log into their BBC accounts in order to vote. Some are theorizing that this might be rolled out to everyone wanting to vote, perhaps as a way to prevent or at least reduce self-voting by disallowing people in participating countries to vote for their own country. Of course nothing is confirmed at this stage, but it's good to start theorizing as rule changes tend to just be suddenly announced, as were the ESC2023 voting changes.
Final Thoughts On Junior Eurovision 2022:
Honestly, even given the...unusual results, this was still probably my favourite JESC so far. (He says, as he watched an entire Two contests.)
The opening ceremony - man, they gave it their all. Having every contestant walk onto the literal red carpet (albeit on a freezing evening in Yerevan I'm sure), asking them some personalized questions, having a little interview with Malena, and then after the running order draw putting on AN ENTIRE MUSICAL WITH AT LEAST 7 SCENES albeit in Armenian, and even getting most of the past winners to lip-sync their winning songs, and remakes of said songs, if any. There were also previous Armenian non-winning participants lip-syncing their old songs as well, such as L.E.V.O.N who seems to have drastically undergone puberty vocally. I'm fairly certain that much of the absolutely massive budget was spent on this ceremony, because WOW. They know how to put on a show.
The live show itself was also great. A great flag parade interleaved with the common song, despite the absence of Katarina from Serbia. Done away with the corny and often unnecessary presenter jokes, and a wonderful medley of all the past winners (I especially liked when the whole choir pulled out red fans for Antes Muerta Que Sencilla, and of course Bzikebi).
Malena performing her new song was also brilliantly staged, plus the song is a banger in its own right. The Snap performance also looked great, although I'm kinda sick of the song so I didn't listen to most of it, though the traditional instruments were a nice touch. Iveta Mukuchyan was a good host; Garik was alright. Karina Ignatyan could use some practice, but as a first-time presenter she did her best. Robin the Robot...if you research about Robin you'll find their functions, but these functions weren't really presented or even mentioned during the show so the whole thing felt a little out of place. Good way to support local businesses though, since the company that developed the robot is indeed from Yerevan. Otherwise, aside from the occasional awkward silence, the show ran very smoothly.
AND THE POSTCARDS! Comparing this with Turin is like heaven and hell. Beautifully executed graphics, and an excellent entry screen with the song title and country name. All tied up very well by the spinning top theme. "Spin The Magic" is still a weird slogan, not gonna lie, but with their execution it just works. Absolutely brilliant show, even if, in the end, they couldn't get 20 countries for the 20th anniversary show.
Regardless, even if we didn't all get the result we wanted, I'm still looking forward to the next contest to be hosted in France. I'm sure that given their experience just two years prior, the French now have the know-how to put on another great show, celebrating youth and music. Here's this blog post in condensed video form, where I voice out some of my thoughts on the show:
(WIP)
Drop a comment if you somehow managed to read all of this, and don't forget that you can always follow me on Twitter @BlueRigel4. Right, I'll see you in 2023 then.
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